Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series,
held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 pm in Shanahan B460. The talks are
open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by
scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series
features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.

Ben Olsen, Rice University Ultracold Atomic Superfluids in 3D, 1D, and in Between

Atomic gases cooled to nanokelvin temperatures can be used to study the physics governing exotic many-body quantum systems, some of which are too complicated for computer simulation. Several many-body systems, including superconductors and neutron stars, exhibit frictionless flow, or superfluidity. We experimentally probe the fermion pairing that leads to superfluidity using laser-trapped clouds of ultracold lithium atoms in two spin ...

New work has shown how to complete the correspondence between the physics of black holes and the laws of thermodynamics by incorporating volume and pressure into the formalism. This results in a change in the interpretation of the black hole's mass, and may give a new handle on understanding aspects of theories of gravity with non-vanishing cosmological constant. This subject ...

Karen E. Daniels, North Carolina State University Playing with Sand: Complex Behaviors from a Simple Material

Granular materials are integral to many parts of our daily lives, from the coffee beans that fuel our mornings to the coal that fuels our power plants. At first glance, these materials might appear simple: macroscopic dry, cohesionless particles which interact only by contact forces. However, they represent a complicated phase of matter neither wholly solid nor wholly liquid: a ...

Jeffrey Filippini, Caltech Listening for the Echoes of Inflation with BICEP2 and Beyond

Our modern account of cosmic history begins with a period of extraordinarily rapid expansion known as inflation. This epoch established the large-scale geometry and uniformity of our universe, as well as sowing the seeds of later galaxy formation. Inflation should further have imprinted a spectrum of primordial gravitational waves onto the universe at cosmological scales. These gravitational waves should have ...

Bruce Schumm, University of California at Santa Cruz Deep Down Beauty: Particle Physics, Mathematics, and the World Around Us

Almost everyone has heard of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and, while stifling a yawn, can regurgitate its particle content: six quarks, a handful of force particles like the photon and gluon, and of course now the Higgs boson. But what many fewer enjoy is an appreciation for the deep underlying mathematical structure that, once grasped, reduces the principles ...

Omer Blaes, University of California at Santa Barbara Dwarf to Super Novae: How Dead Stars Occasionally Light Up and Tell Us About the Universe

Billions of years in the future, our Sun will eventually run out of all of its fuel and will turn into an extraordinarily dense, Earth-sized star known as a white dwarf. Most white dwarfs, including our future Sun, slowly fade into oblivion, but if they can steal matter from another nearby star, they can rejuvenate themselves. Many such “new stars”, ...

Alan Guth and John Kovac, via edited video of a colloquium at Harvard from 25 March 2014, Harvey Mudd College Peeking Under the Cosmic Veil

“For decades circumstantial evidence from observational cosmology has suggested that our universe may have started with a bang — an initial violent explosion and expansion of space known as inflation. As the universe expanded, it cooled down from an initial super hot and opaque primordial soup of mass and energy. At some point around 300,000 years after the initial bang, ...

Quantum Annealing (QA) is an algorithm proposed as one of a potentially powerful set of methods to solve computationally hard problems. It is generally believed that a quantum algorithm must in some way harness entanglement to be able to provide any significant speed-up over classical algorithms. Unfortunately, the absence of microwave signals in the D-Wave processor, a system designed to ...

With the increasing world demand of energy and in particulartransportation fuel, new and alternative sources of energy must be found and developed. Unconventional resources in the form of shale oil could provide a substantial fraction of future energy demand. In this talk, we will discuss results from laboratory studies to understand the physics of and technology being developed to unlock ...

Light-matter interactions are central to a wide range of scientific and technological disciplines. Though optical interactions have been important to advancing our understanding of atoms, molecules, and materials, the microscopic details of how light manipulates matter are often poorly understood. A material's optical response is complex, determined by coupled manybody interactions that vary on an atomic length scale. While data ...

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are atomic-scale spin systems with remarkable quantum properties that persist to room temperature. They are highly sensitive to a wide variety of fields (magnetic, electric, thermal) and are easy to initialize, read-out, and manipulate on the individual spin level; thus they make excellent nanoscale sensors. The NV’s sensitivity is a double-edged sword however; environmental fluctuating ...

Superresolution microscopy techniques enable fluorescence imaging of live cells with subwavelength resolution. These techniques generally fall into two categories, depending on whether fluorescent molecules are controlled deterministically or stochastically. In stochastic techniques, fluorescent molecules blink on and off, with only a small fraction of them emitting light at any given time. Consequently, the molecules form non-overlapping blurs in the image ...

Sub-Neptune and super-Earth sized planets are a new planet category. They account for 80% of the planet candidates discovered by Kepler, and 0% of the planets in the Solar System. What is the nature of these sub-Neptune-size planets, how did they form, and why are they so numerous? I will review some highlights from the complement of exotic sub-Neptune-size planets ...